POGGIOLI FORUM JOHN F. KENNEDY LIBRARY PAGE 1 JOHN SHATTUCK: Good afternoon and welcome to the John F. Kennedy Library. I'm John Shattuck, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation. On behalf of myself, Library Director Deborah Leff, and Paul Kirk, the Chair of our Board of Directors, I want to thank the sponsors of tonight's Forum, Fleet Boston Financial, the Lowell Institute, Boston Capital, the Boston Globe, Boston.com, and, above all, WBUR, where we always know we've been treated to something special when a familiar voice wraps up her report by telling us with a certain flair, "This is Sylvia Poggioli," in Rome or in Jerusalem or in Sarajevo or in Belgrade or whatever hot spot she's reporting from that day. For more than two decades Sylvia Poggioli has helped us understand the world, particularly the world seen from Europe and reported on by a very astute American observer. Whether it's the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, the war in Yugoslavia, the Vatican's handling of the clergy sex abuse scandal, the European reaction to the U.S. intervention in Iraq, or something as simple and wonderful as the arrival of spring in Paris, Sylvia Poggioli always seems to be there. Her vivid accounts mix the sensible with the exotic, the down-to-earth with the profound, the bright with the dark. And, in the end, we always feel a little bit wiser after hearing from her. I can tell you, as a diplomat in the Balkans during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, I learned always to trust what Sylvia was saying about the horrors that were unfolding in what was once Yugoslavia. And I'm convinced that it was brave reporters like Sylvia Poggioli, like Elizabeth Neuffer of The Boston Globe who was killed last month in Iraq and whom we mourn, who kept the spotlight on the POGGIOLI FORUM JOHN F. KENNEDY LIBRARY PAGE 2 worst human rights crisis in Europe since the Second World War, so that the world would eventually, and finally, do something about it. Sylvia is the daughter of Italian anti-fascists who were forced to flee Italy under Mussolini. Before joining National Public Radio as a foreign correspondent in 1982, she was an editor for the Italian News Agency, ANSA, and over the years she has been showered with honors for her NPR reporting. Her early reports on Bosnia earned her a George Foster Peabody award and an Edward Weintal journalism prize. And she later won the Silver Excellence in Media Award, the National Women's Political Caucus Exceptional Merit Media Award. She was part of the NPR team that received the Overseas Press Club Award for coverage of the NATO air war in Kosovo and Serbia. Then last year Sylvia received the Welles Hangen Award for Distinguished Journalism from Brown University. Sylvia will speak to us tonight about the tensions between Europe and the United States over the Iraq war and, more generally, over American foreign policy as it is now being conducted in its particular unilateral fashion. To guide tonight's discussion we are very fortunate to have with us another star of National Public Radio, Dick Gordon, familiar to all of us here in Boston, and host of "The Connection." A frequent Kennedy Library moderator, Dick previously served as Senior Correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's leading national public POGGIOLI FORUM JOHN F. KENNEDY LIBRARY PAGE 3 affairs program, "This Morning," and during the last decade he has covered the conflicts in Bosnia, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Middle East. Dick has received two National Journalism Awards and two Gabriel Awards for Excellence in Reporting. So please join me in welcoming again Sylvia Poggioli and Dick Gordon to the stage of the Kennedy Library. Sylvia? SYLVIA POGGIOLI: Thank you very much. It's really a tremendous honor to be here. I don't know about you, but the last few days I've been watching television a lot. Since I'm here I'm not, I'm not in Evian. I wasn't in Evian for the G8 Summit, but I've been, like many, many reporters, closely monitoring what was going on there. I think it resembled a little bit the court of Louis XIV. All eyes were fixed on the body language, on the pecking order, and everybody was analyzing the warmth of the handshakes, the intensity of the backslapping and the smiles. And everybody counted how many minutes the courtiers, that is, the European leaders, were granted in private audiences to the world's single superpower. The G8 Summit was seen as the testing ground to determine the state of the worst crisis in a half-century long transAtlantic relationship. Despite the assurances on all sides that the acrimonious debate over the war in Iraq was behind them, I think there were very few signs of a serious reconciliation. POGGIOLI FORUM JOHN F. KENNEDY LIBRARY PAGE 4 And, meanwhile, a new controversy is bubbling. Where are Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? Many European editorialists, including some that have been consistently pro-war, are now wondering whether they were deceived by the U.S. and British governments. Now the transAtlantic crisis has of course been marked by personal animosities, by bad personal chemistry, by misunderstandings, national rivalries, and a series of diplomatic errors and miscalculations on both sides. And there have been many casualties. The main institutions of the international system, especially NATO and the U.N., have been seriously weakened. The European Union's efforts to forge common foreign and security policies have been undermined. And the new U.S.-Russia entente has been battered. And now analysts are asking themselves "What went wrong?" and "Could this conflict have been avoided?" "How serious is the damage?" "What are the prospects for full reconciliation between Europe and the United States?" In the lead-up to the war, during the fighting and in its aftermath, there has been a great deal of international name-calling, and even threats. There were mutual misperceptions on each side. Europe, I believe, did not fully grasp the impact of 9/11, the impact 9/11 had on American society and on the America psyche. And the United States underestimated Europe's deep abhorrence for war. As German Foreign Minister Joschke Fischer has said, "Americans have no Verdun." In the U.S., there is nothing comparable to Auschwitz or Stalingrad or any of the other terrible, symbolic places in European history. And Fischer stressed that the process to create a united Europe is the answer to centuries of European wars and slaughter. POGGIOLI FORUM JOHN F. KENNEDY LIBRARY PAGE 5 This is one of the reasons why, despite their internal divisions, Europeans strongly believe in the role of international institutions and consensus-building through international law. And they're wary of what they perceive as American hegemony and unilateralism. The Bush administration, on the other hand, sees the status quo as inherently dangerous and destabilizing, and international treaties as ineffective, and a constraint on U.S. freedom of action. And sharp differences in the language used on each side of the Atlantic underscore the transAtlantic estrangement. The word heard most often in Washington is "threat." In Europe, it's "negotiations." The French analyst Dominique Moisi summed up the European view this way: "The Bush administration has the great responsibility of having exported U.S. fears instead of U.S. hopes." I believe that this transAtlantic crisis over the war did not occur in a void. It's the result of a deep disconnect between Europe and the United States, not only on how they view the framework of the new international order, but also it comes out of deep social and cultural differences. The rift has been simplified as a dispute between two cartoon-like stereotypes. Bush as the trigger-happy cowboy, and Europeans as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys." In reality, the roots of the crisis go back at least a decade to the end of the Cold War. It was in the nineties that one of the most destabilizing factors in the transAtlantic relationship fully emerged. It's the military-technological gap. POGGIOLI FORUM JOHN F. KENNEDY LIBRARY PAGE 6 It became increasingly apparent during the 1999 war on Kosovo. It was NATO's first war. It was the first humanitarian intervention. And it was conceived, in part, as a means to redefine the alliance's identity and to reassert the Allies' cohesion in the new post-Cold War period. But today Europeans see the Kosovo war as their diplomatic and military debacle. The Economist called it "Europe's humiliation." The campaign showed the great technological supremacy of the United States. And as the bombing progressed, the role of the European allies diminished day by day and became absolutely marginal. The military-technological gap shocked the Europeans. They realized they had no satellite intelligence-gathering capacity, no long-range air transport, and no laser- guided bombs. A report by the French Defense Ministry acknowledged with alarm a few months later that "Europe is decades behind the United States in military technology." During the Cold War, European and American military spending was more or less constant, with European spending 60% of what the U.S. spent. Today the American military budget is almost double that of all the other NATO countries combined. With the exception of Britain, the strategic military imbalance is so wide that the U.S. really didn't even need the European military assistance in Afghanistan or, of course, in Iraq.